Laith
I think this book has been around long enough to have a reputation that precedes it. In fact, the only thing I knew about 2666 was its reputation for quality among contemporary literary works. It absolutely lives up to that reputation, this book is challenging and ambitious; sprawling in scope and content, and I'm not just talking page count. This is a novel that overwhelms you, basically guaranteeing itself a reread before it's even finished.
It's a challenge just to explain what the book is about, because unlike a standard novel which delivers one linear plot, this story is fragmentary. 2666 is broken up into 5 distinct parts, which surround a series of unsolved murders in the city of Santa Teresa (a facsimile of Ciudad Juárez). The city is a nexus that draws to itself literary critics, sportswriter journalists, convicts, and dreamers; these stories of murder and mystery run tangential to the search for a reclusive German novelist, Benno Von Archimboldi (a reference to B. Traven, which is worth a Google). These parts are not genre writing, do not expect to read anything at all like a mystery novel, the mystery is the novel itself.
Those are just the broad strokes, each part tells an independent story, and it's the shared details of those minor stories which inform the larger narrative. When I first cracked this open, my intent was to review each piece independently, in keeping with the Author's last will. But that's not how something like this works. 2666 is the sum of its parts, and structured unlike anything else I've ever read. The pieces fit together however you want to puzzle it- but there are only enough pieces to give the impression of the image on the box.
This is an ambitious project, and if you're anything like me, you'll rip through the first three parts of this book grasping for anything resembling a meta-narrative to connect them. Then you'll read the fourth part, the part about the crimes, which was the literary equivalent of spending the day inside a war memorial or a holocaust museum, only for the fifth part to drag you through the horror of the Eastern front of WW2. It’s only once you're beaten down and exhausted, your expectations of what a book could be completely shattered, that Bolaño finally releases those last, crucial details to tie it all together. And then you realize that you've spent the last month reading almost a thousand pages, driven on almost solely by the brilliance of the prose and your own increasingly ravenous curiosity.
That's four paragraphs just on premise and structure alone, and we haven't even touched on prose or theme or the context of the author's life-are you starting to see the problem when it comes to reviewing this? It's a Masterpiece, like one for the canon and not just hyperbole, you could write 10,000 words on it and not even come close to paying it justice! Look at the other reviews, others have tried! This book is a deep sea of ideas and philosophy and perspective and metatextual commentary; these ideas serve as Bolaño's mark on the field of literature. I find it telling that it's only within the book itself that I can find the words to describe both the spirit and the enormity of its contents.
"Vulture of my Prometheus self or Prometheus of my Vulture self, [...] You may say that literature doesn't consist solely of masterpieces, but rather is populated by so called minor works. I believed that, too. Literature is a vast forest and the masterpieces are the lakes, the towering trees or strange trees, the lovely eloquent flowers, the hidden caves, but a forest is also made up of ordinary trees, patches of grass, puddles, clinging vines, mushrooms and little wild-flowers. I was wrong. There's actually no such thing as a minor work. [...] Every minor work has a secret author and every secret author is, by definition, a writer of masterpieces [...] There's nothing inside the man who sits there writing. Nothing of himself I mean, [...] His novel or book of poems, decent, adequate, arises not from an exercise of style or will, as the poor unfortunate believes, but as the result of an exercise of concealment. There must be many books, many lovely pines, to shield from hungry eyes the book that really matters, the wretched cave of our misfortune, the magic flower of winter!"
I won't gush any further, because this book is not perfect. If you've skipped straight to the cons, then let me summarize the reading experience: exhausting and overwhelming. As novel as the structure is, and as successful as Bolaño is in delivering the narrative in spite of it, there are long stretches of the book where the reader is completely in the dark and subjected to the vicissitude of his trains of thought. If you're, someone who needs a constant sense of narrative progression, you are going to hate this book. If you are someone who cannot stand it when authors go off on long tangents that weave in and out of dialogue, you are going to hate this book. It's as simple as that.
You may also get the sense that the book is unfinished, and that's because by norms of publishing it is. Bolaño was racing the reaper by the end of the writing process, with the book only receiving one round of editing and feedback before his passing, and the posthumous release. There are gaps in quality and gaps in the narrative, but it's not clear if the final product was delivered by design or simply the clock's final result. This is my first Bolaño novel, so I can't really weigh in, people with more grounding in his body of work generally agree that what we got is very close to that hypothetical final draft.
It doesn't escape me that I've been complimenting the prose in a translation, so I must give a nod to Natasha Wimmer, I've read enough poor translations to recognize quality when I see it. While I obviously cannot compare the translation to the original, for the prose to contain so much of the author's voice and so little of the translator's interpretation speaks volumes.
For me 2666 sits up there with Moby Dick, a reading experience that I had all but forgotten until 2666 reminded me. I can recall how difficult I found Moby Dick at the start, only to read on, dictionary close to hand, and find myself transformed by the experience. Not only had I just exposed myself to something profound, but I had tested my mastery over language and redefined what I found to be a challenge. It was an eye-opening piece of literature to me, the feeling of accomplishment that comes with overcoming something challenging was just the cherry on top.
While 2666 isn't perfect, and something of a chore to read, I felt the same feeling as I did with Moby Dick when I turned the last page of this book. A feeling that the experience of reading the book was just as valuable as its content.
PS: I know this review is huge, but I have a few extra notes as I come back to edit this.
First: I’ve tried really hard not to comment directly on the themes/my interpretation of the book in this review. That’s unique to this book because a. I could probably go on for at least another thousand words and b. I think your enjoyment of this text is determined by how curious of a reader you are. Much of this book is focused on the surface level events, the banal, and the remaining elements all point away from resolution; trying to understand the why, piercing through the subtlety, that is the core of the reading experience. I feel like explaining would spoil that experience, interpretations are something best saved to discuss with other readers.
With that said, if you somehow read through this whole review and you need to know what it's actually about, I can't put it any better than phantom_fonte did in this reddit comment (https://www.reddit.com/r/literature/comments/1coc67d/comment/l3g1qjm/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1).
Second: I managed to get through all this without ever commenting on how much I adore the cover? People say don’t judge a book by its cover but like, this must be the exception that proves the rule. It’s a just small portion of Jupiter and Semele, the painting by the symbolist Gustave Moreau, and you should really look at the entire thing of it. If you know the story of Semele, the cover becomes yet another element added to the narrative. Out of all the possible elements in the full painting, the selection of death and the white lily is not lost on me either, “At the foot of the throne, Death and Sorrow form the tragic basis of Human Life.”
I think this book has been around long enough to have a reputation that precedes it. In fact, the only thing I knew about 2666 was its reputation for quality among contemporary literary works. It absolutely lives up to that reputation, this book is challenging and ambitious; sprawling in scope and content, and I'm not just talking page count. This is a novel that overwhelms you, basically guaranteeing itself a reread before it's even finished.
It's a challenge just to explain what the book is about, because unlike a standard novel which delivers one linear plot, this story is fragmentary. 2666 is broken up into 5 distinct parts, which surround a series of unsolved murders in the city of Santa Teresa (a facsimile of Ciudad Juárez). The city is a nexus that draws to itself literary critics, sportswriter journalists, convicts, and dreamers; these stories of murder and mystery run tangential to the search for a reclusive German novelist, Benno Von Archimboldi (a reference to B. Traven, which is worth a Google). These parts are not genre writing, do not expect to read anything at all like a mystery novel, the mystery is the novel itself.
Those are just the broad strokes, each part tells an independent story, and it's the shared details of those minor stories which inform the larger narrative. When I first cracked this open, my intent was to review each piece independently, in keeping with the Author's last will. But that's not how something like this works. 2666 is the sum of its parts, and structured unlike anything else I've ever read. The pieces fit together however you want to puzzle it- but there are only enough pieces to give the impression of the image on the box.
This is an ambitious project, and if you're anything like me, you'll rip through the first three parts of this book grasping for anything resembling a meta-narrative to connect them. Then you'll read the fourth part, the part about the crimes, which was the literary equivalent of spending the day inside a war memorial or a holocaust museum, only for the fifth part to drag you through the horror of the Eastern front of WW2. It’s only once you're beaten down and exhausted, your expectations of what a book could be completely shattered, that Bolaño finally releases those last, crucial details to tie it all together. And then you realize that you've spent the last month reading almost a thousand pages, driven on almost solely by the brilliance of the prose and your own increasingly ravenous curiosity.
That's four paragraphs just on premise and structure alone, and we haven't even touched on prose or theme or the context of the author's life-are you starting to see the problem when it comes to reviewing this? It's a Masterpiece, like one for the canon and not just hyperbole, you could write 10,000 words on it and not even come close to paying it justice! Look at the other reviews, others have tried! This book is a deep sea of ideas and philosophy and perspective and metatextual commentary; these ideas serve as Bolaño's mark on the field of literature. I find it telling that it's only within the book itself that I can find the words to describe both the spirit and the enormity of its contents.
"Vulture of my Prometheus self or Prometheus of my Vulture self, [...] You may say that literature doesn't consist solely of masterpieces, but rather is populated by so called minor works. I believed that, too. Literature is a vast forest and the masterpieces are the lakes, the towering trees or strange trees, the lovely eloquent flowers, the hidden caves, but a forest is also made up of ordinary trees, patches of grass, puddles, clinging vines, mushrooms and little wild-flowers. I was wrong. There's actually no such thing as a minor work. [...] Every minor work has a secret author and every secret author is, by definition, a writer of masterpieces [...] There's nothing inside the man who sits there writing. Nothing of himself I mean, [...] His novel or book of poems, decent, adequate, arises not from an exercise of style or will, as the poor unfortunate believes, but as the result of an exercise of concealment. There must be many books, many lovely pines, to shield from hungry eyes the book that really matters, the wretched cave of our misfortune, the magic flower of winter!"
I won't gush any further, because this book is not perfect. If you've skipped straight to the cons, then let me summarize the reading experience: exhausting and overwhelming. As novel as the structure is, and as successful as Bolaño is in delivering the narrative in spite of it, there are long stretches of the book where the reader is completely in the dark and subjected to the vicissitude of his trains of thought. If you're, someone who needs a constant sense of narrative progression, you are going to hate this book. If you are someone who cannot stand it when authors go off on long tangents that weave in and out of dialogue, you are going to hate this book. It's as simple as that.
You may also get the sense that the book is unfinished, and that's because by norms of publishing it is. Bolaño was racing the reaper by the end of the writing process, with the book only receiving one round of editing and feedback before his passing, and the posthumous release. There are gaps in quality and gaps in the narrative, but it's not clear if the final product was delivered by design or simply the clock's final result. This is my first Bolaño novel, so I can't really weigh in, people with more grounding in his body of work generally agree that what we got is very close to that hypothetical final draft.
It doesn't escape me that I've been complimenting the prose in a translation, so I must give a nod to Natasha Wimmer, I've read enough poor translations to recognize quality when I see it. While I obviously cannot compare the translation to the original, for the prose to contain so much of the author's voice and so little of the translator's interpretation speaks volumes.
For me 2666 sits up there with Moby Dick, a reading experience that I had all but forgotten until 2666 reminded me. I can recall how difficult I found Moby Dick at the start, only to read on, dictionary close to hand, and find myself transformed by the experience. Not only had I just exposed myself to something profound, but I had tested my mastery over language and redefined what I found to be a challenge. It was an eye-opening piece of literature to me, the feeling of accomplishment that comes with overcoming something challenging was just the cherry on top.
While 2666 isn't perfect, and something of a chore to read, I felt the same feeling as I did with Moby Dick when I turned the last page of this book. A feeling that the experience of reading the book was just as valuable as its content.
PS: I know this review is huge, but I have a few extra notes as I come back to edit this.
First: I’ve tried really hard not to comment directly on the themes/my interpretation of the book in this review. That’s unique to this book because a. I could probably go on for at least another thousand words and b. I think your enjoyment of this text is determined by how curious of a reader you are. Much of this book is focused on the surface level events, the banal, and the remaining elements all point away from resolution; trying to understand the why, piercing through the subtlety, that is the core of the reading experience. I feel like explaining would spoil that experience, interpretations are something best saved to discuss with other readers.
With that said, if you somehow read through this whole review and you need to know what it's actually about, I can't put it any better than phantom_fonte did in this reddit comment (https://www.reddit.com/r/literature/comments/1coc67d/comment/l3g1qjm/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1).
Second: I managed to get through all this without ever commenting on how much I adore the cover? People say don’t judge a book by its cover but like, this must be the exception that proves the rule. It’s a just small portion of Jupiter and Semele, the painting by the symbolist Gustave Moreau, and you should really look at the entire thing of it. If you know the story of Semele, the cover becomes yet another element added to the narrative. Out of all the possible elements in the full painting, the selection of death and the white lily is not lost on me either, “At the foot of the throne, Death and Sorrow form the tragic basis of Human Life.”